‘NCIS: New Orleans’ Season 7 to Include Coronavirus Storyline That Affects Loretta

One NCIS series will be addressing the real-world coronavirus pandemic in the 2020-2021 season.

The NCIS: New Orleans Season 7 premiere will “be about COVID,” specifically what happened early on, series star CCH Pounder (who plays coroner Dr. Loretta Wade) relayed about a call she received from executive producers Jan Nash and Chris Silber to TVLine. Loretta will know one of the people brought into the morgue; she’d told that person how to stay safe and healthy. (“I think Loretta will most likely stick her neck out [with an opinion],” she said of her character.)

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This storyline “reflects on the first part of the [pandemic] situation with masks and people saying, ‘No, I’m fine! I don’t need to wear a mask,'” Pounder previewed. “It’s quite a shock to her that she wasn’t listened to, or that it wasn’t that important to this person.”

When NCIS: New Orleans left off, it had ended its sixth season early, albeit with a bit of a cliffhanger. Special Agent Hannah Khoury (Necar Zadegan) fought back against Deputy Director Van Cleef (Richard Thomas), who had demoted her in the premiere, after discovering he had a problem with female field agents. She forced him to either resign or risk her bringing what she’d discovered to the Senate hearing for his promotion to Chief of Naval Operations. (He chose the former.) But at the end of the episode, he visited her at home with a warning that it wouldn’t make a difference because of his years climbing the ladder.

(Sam Lothridge/CBS)

NCIS: New Orleans joins medical dramas Grey’s Anatomy, The Resident, and The Good Doctor with plans to have art imitate life when it comes to the pandemic in new episodes.

NCIS: New Orleans, Season 7, Fall 2020, CBS